As far as I know, there are now at least two mercury-like and bean-like public art sculptures in the US by Anish Kapoor. The first is, of course, in Chicago's Millennium Park (pictured above). Commonly referred to as just "The Bean", the sculpture was dedicated in 2006 and, since then, has gained international fame as a solid place to take a selfie.
But as of this year, there is now a second "mini-bean" in New York's Tribeca neighborhood. Sitting literally underneath 56 Leonard (a residential tower designed by Herzog & de Meuron), this bean varietal was first announced in 2008, but has taken a few years to be completed. The building itself was completed about 5 five years ago.
It turns out though, that all beans are not made equal. Here's some initial feedback from Bloomberg CityLab's Kristin Capps:
New York’s half-bean feels half-baked: a disappointing imitation for the city and a franchise play by the artist. For New York to install the lesser version of a Chicago icon reeks of second-city status. And while the original sculpture is still a treasure, the second iteration feels like a monument from 20 years ago — because it is.
But it's all perception. If Chicago's bean had never been unveiled in 2006, and this was the first shiny urban selfie bean, then I'm sure we'd all be headed to Lower Manhattan with our phones. But instead, here we are talking about how it "reeks of second-city status" and how it is the "eyesore that no one asked for".
It's all very fascinating if you think about it. And it's a perfect example of why blockchains are proving to be so valuable in the world of art. Because with art, provenance and authenticity are everything. You need to know where it came from, who made it, and that it's scarce. And as we can see here, it can be the difference between loving a bean and hating a bean.
Photo by Wicker Woodsong on Unsplash
The central bank tightening and interest rate hikes that we saw last year will come to an end in the first quarter of 2023 as inflation gets under control. This will ultimately lead to a recession but my sense is that it will be more mild than severe. For this reason, I don't think anyone should expect ultra-low rates to return in the short-term.
Much of the real estate sector went on pause in the second half of 2022. But ultimately this reset to a more balanced market is going to be necessarily painful for some. And I think we will see that pain play out in the first half of the year. This will obviously be bad for some, but it will create opportunities for others.
Construction costs tempered in the second half of 2022 and started to show some evidence of price softening. I think we will see more of this in 2023, which will be healthy for the market. Cost management over the last few years has been a meat grinder for the development industry.
Pre-construction condominium sales for well-located projects will return in a more fulsome way by the spring. This will be driven by buyers now having clarity around where interest rates will be hanging out in the short-term and, in the case of Canada's largest cities, by record-high immigration levels.
For the tertiary/fringe housing markets that saw big run ups in pricing during the pandemic, I unfortunately think it will take many years for prices to fully rebound. The price increases we saw in these submarkets were of course a result of low rates, but it was also driven by a view on urban decentralization that in my view did not actually materialize.
The desire to add more housing to single-family neighborhoods will continue to pick up steam across North America. How exactly this plays out will be market specific, but in Toronto I expect to see new planning policies put in place, as well as supportive building code changes.
Public transit ridership will remain below pre-pandemic levels throughout 2023. This will continue to exacerbate public finances.
Autonomous taxis will grow rapidly this year. Companies, such as Cruise, will expand into a number of new US markets and, at some point during the year, I will take my very first ride in an autonomous vehicle.
2023 will be a big year for augmented reality and “phygital” goods. Last year I thought Apple would release a new product in this space. That didn't happen, but it will this year. At the same time, we will see more companies releasing products that blur the lines between our online and offline worlds (hence "phygital"). This will include NFTs and other crypto-related things that will start to operate more seamlessly in the background of consumer-facing products/services.
I continue to be bullish on Ethereum and I think it will overtake Bitcoin in terms of market cap in the next 2-3 years. But I was very wrong about Solana last year. And now I am struggling with its value proposition. Today, layer 2 chains such as Polygon feel more likely to win out. Broadly speaking, I suspect 2023 will be a positive year for crypto, but not a record-setting one.
In summary, I think we are going to see more pain at the beginning of 2023, but that on the other side of it will be healthier and more balanced markets. This means that we can look forward to the end of the year feeling much better than it does right now. All of this said, please keep in mind that I'm often wrong and that nothing in this post should be construed as actual advice.
Happy 2023, friends. I'm excited to get going.
This morning, I came across an FT article talking about how mainland Chinese people are right now flocking to Macau to receive western mRNA vaccines. Apparently the Special Administrative Region has a single hospital offering the western varietals to "tourists", and lots of people now want them and presumably think they are more efficacious than the Chinese alternatives. This is not surprising.
So what actually stood out to me was the photo that FT chose for the article. It's of the half-scale Eiffel Tower replica that was built as part of a $2.5 billion casino resort in Macau known as The Parisian Macao (pictured above). There's even a faux Louvre-like building behind it and a "Jardin" in front of it so you can get that axial view of the tower. Welcome to Paris!
Of course, this is not the sort of thing that excites me in the least. I understand why it is done and that there is clearly a market for it, but I don't get it. It feels totally empty. Have we really run out of new ideas? So I decided to tweet something out to this effect and, in it, I included the fun fact that Macau is a former Portuguese colony and currently a Special Administrative Region of China, just like Hong Kong.
But it turns out that you can't say this on Twitter. I don't know why, but my tweet was immediately filtered out of my feed -- twice. Instead what you can say is "Macau is a SAR of a country that starts with C and ends with A." Apparently, this is acceptable Twitter language. Hmm. This has never happened to me before.
Thankfully, I have my own domain (which you are now reading from) where things are much freer. And collectively, we have things like the Ethereum Name Service, which is trying to create an even more censorship-resistant version of the internet. So today I decided that it was time to cancel my Twitter Blue account and put some more money into ENS tokens. This feels more like the future.
As far as I know, there are now at least two mercury-like and bean-like public art sculptures in the US by Anish Kapoor. The first is, of course, in Chicago's Millennium Park (pictured above). Commonly referred to as just "The Bean", the sculpture was dedicated in 2006 and, since then, has gained international fame as a solid place to take a selfie.
But as of this year, there is now a second "mini-bean" in New York's Tribeca neighborhood. Sitting literally underneath 56 Leonard (a residential tower designed by Herzog & de Meuron), this bean varietal was first announced in 2008, but has taken a few years to be completed. The building itself was completed about 5 five years ago.
It turns out though, that all beans are not made equal. Here's some initial feedback from Bloomberg CityLab's Kristin Capps:
New York’s half-bean feels half-baked: a disappointing imitation for the city and a franchise play by the artist. For New York to install the lesser version of a Chicago icon reeks of second-city status. And while the original sculpture is still a treasure, the second iteration feels like a monument from 20 years ago — because it is.
But it's all perception. If Chicago's bean had never been unveiled in 2006, and this was the first shiny urban selfie bean, then I'm sure we'd all be headed to Lower Manhattan with our phones. But instead, here we are talking about how it "reeks of second-city status" and how it is the "eyesore that no one asked for".
It's all very fascinating if you think about it. And it's a perfect example of why blockchains are proving to be so valuable in the world of art. Because with art, provenance and authenticity are everything. You need to know where it came from, who made it, and that it's scarce. And as we can see here, it can be the difference between loving a bean and hating a bean.
Photo by Wicker Woodsong on Unsplash
The central bank tightening and interest rate hikes that we saw last year will come to an end in the first quarter of 2023 as inflation gets under control. This will ultimately lead to a recession but my sense is that it will be more mild than severe. For this reason, I don't think anyone should expect ultra-low rates to return in the short-term.
Much of the real estate sector went on pause in the second half of 2022. But ultimately this reset to a more balanced market is going to be necessarily painful for some. And I think we will see that pain play out in the first half of the year. This will obviously be bad for some, but it will create opportunities for others.
Construction costs tempered in the second half of 2022 and started to show some evidence of price softening. I think we will see more of this in 2023, which will be healthy for the market. Cost management over the last few years has been a meat grinder for the development industry.
Pre-construction condominium sales for well-located projects will return in a more fulsome way by the spring. This will be driven by buyers now having clarity around where interest rates will be hanging out in the short-term and, in the case of Canada's largest cities, by record-high immigration levels.
For the tertiary/fringe housing markets that saw big run ups in pricing during the pandemic, I unfortunately think it will take many years for prices to fully rebound. The price increases we saw in these submarkets were of course a result of low rates, but it was also driven by a view on urban decentralization that in my view did not actually materialize.
The desire to add more housing to single-family neighborhoods will continue to pick up steam across North America. How exactly this plays out will be market specific, but in Toronto I expect to see new planning policies put in place, as well as supportive building code changes.
Public transit ridership will remain below pre-pandemic levels throughout 2023. This will continue to exacerbate public finances.
Autonomous taxis will grow rapidly this year. Companies, such as Cruise, will expand into a number of new US markets and, at some point during the year, I will take my very first ride in an autonomous vehicle.
2023 will be a big year for augmented reality and “phygital” goods. Last year I thought Apple would release a new product in this space. That didn't happen, but it will this year. At the same time, we will see more companies releasing products that blur the lines between our online and offline worlds (hence "phygital"). This will include NFTs and other crypto-related things that will start to operate more seamlessly in the background of consumer-facing products/services.
I continue to be bullish on Ethereum and I think it will overtake Bitcoin in terms of market cap in the next 2-3 years. But I was very wrong about Solana last year. And now I am struggling with its value proposition. Today, layer 2 chains such as Polygon feel more likely to win out. Broadly speaking, I suspect 2023 will be a positive year for crypto, but not a record-setting one.
In summary, I think we are going to see more pain at the beginning of 2023, but that on the other side of it will be healthier and more balanced markets. This means that we can look forward to the end of the year feeling much better than it does right now. All of this said, please keep in mind that I'm often wrong and that nothing in this post should be construed as actual advice.
Happy 2023, friends. I'm excited to get going.
This morning, I came across an FT article talking about how mainland Chinese people are right now flocking to Macau to receive western mRNA vaccines. Apparently the Special Administrative Region has a single hospital offering the western varietals to "tourists", and lots of people now want them and presumably think they are more efficacious than the Chinese alternatives. This is not surprising.
So what actually stood out to me was the photo that FT chose for the article. It's of the half-scale Eiffel Tower replica that was built as part of a $2.5 billion casino resort in Macau known as The Parisian Macao (pictured above). There's even a faux Louvre-like building behind it and a "Jardin" in front of it so you can get that axial view of the tower. Welcome to Paris!
Of course, this is not the sort of thing that excites me in the least. I understand why it is done and that there is clearly a market for it, but I don't get it. It feels totally empty. Have we really run out of new ideas? So I decided to tweet something out to this effect and, in it, I included the fun fact that Macau is a former Portuguese colony and currently a Special Administrative Region of China, just like Hong Kong.
But it turns out that you can't say this on Twitter. I don't know why, but my tweet was immediately filtered out of my feed -- twice. Instead what you can say is "Macau is a SAR of a country that starts with C and ends with A." Apparently, this is acceptable Twitter language. Hmm. This has never happened to me before.
Thankfully, I have my own domain (which you are now reading from) where things are much freer. And collectively, we have things like the Ethereum Name Service, which is trying to create an even more censorship-resistant version of the internet. So today I decided that it was time to cancel my Twitter Blue account and put some more money into ENS tokens. This feels more like the future.
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